The PPC Den: Amazon PPC Advertising Mastery

Sean Stone of Spillover Commerce is back on The PPC Den, and this time he refused to tell Mike the topic in advance. No pre-show. No planning. Just one question: which billion-dollar e-commerce market has nine of its eleven biggest players missing from Amazon?

Mike guessed mattresses. It's telehealth.

🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing/

🦡 Sean's agency, Spillover Commerce ➡️ https://www.spillovercommerce.com/

🦡 Show notes ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/the-billion-dollar-brands-leaving-amazon-search-wide-open-the-ppc-den-podcast/

From there Mike and Sean get into what this means for everyone else: why the best Amazon brands cut their bottom 5% of products every quarter, why 15% of Google searches have never been searched before, why "demand generation" is a scary phrase if all you do is demand capture, and how to turn Amazon into an acquisition channel with a product insert, a QR code and a Meta pixel.

Also in here: what telehealth brands could be selling on Amazon tomorrow, why continuous monitoring might be the next GLP-1, and Sean's new tagline, "Amazon demand starts elsewhere."

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 - Intro

01:28 - The billion-dollar market that isn't on Amazon

02:49 - It's telehealth: D2C brands with a prescriber

04:18 - The haves: Hims and Ro

05:39 - The have-nots: GLP-1 brands with nothing on Amazon

06:23 - Who ranks when you search "Weight Watchers"

07:17 - "They paid for a billboard and left it empty"

07:45 - A market growing 24.6% a year through 2034

09:05 - Bigger than GLP-1: peptides, wearables, longevity

10:40 - "GLP-1 supplement support": 30,000 searches from nothing

11:53 - Protein snacks: 4x the search volume in three years

12:40 - Fiber gummies and the hockey stick

13:38 - Brand name plus modifier searches

14:00 - The spillover effect, featuring Gronk

16:03 - Trend spotting as a business model

17:56 - Nature Made's GLP-1 Companion: 10K units a month

19:23 - Why clinging to your catalog hurts your PPC

21:13 - 15% of Google searches are brand new

22:20 - Cut your bottom 5% every quarter

24:22 - "Amazon demand starts elsewhere"

25:32 - Demand generation vs demand capture

28:34 - What telehealth brands could sell on Amazon tomorrow

29:57 - Continuous monitoring is the next GLP-1

30:24 - Amazon as an acquisition channel

31:13 - The product insert, QR code and Meta pixel play

31:40 - The one DSP use case Sean likes

34:36 - You can't be full funnel if you're only on Amazon

35:59 - Go talk to your customers

37:09 - A "generational bag fumble"

38:44 - Will Spillover become a health-focused agency?

39:42 - Niche till it hurts

41:59 - Where to find Sean

🦡 Resources & Links

- Find Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-erickson-facchin/

- How to Launch Meta Ads as an Amazon Seller [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/how-to-launch-meta-ads-as-an-amazon-seller-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- 3 Unfair Advantages of the Top 1% of E-commerce Brands [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/3-unfair-advantages-of-the-top-1-of-e-commerce-brands-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- Why Amazon Brands Are Starting to Use Meta Ads and Shopify [The PPC Den Podcast]

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/why-amazon-brands-are-starting-to-use-meta-ads-and-shopify-the-ppc-den-podcast/

- Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/

- Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/

- Review all our show notes: https://www.adbadger.com/podcast

-

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin

Guest Co-Host: Sean Stone

Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Gonza Martinez is back on the PPC Den, and a lot has changed since his last visit seven months ago.

He used to be the guy in the ad console every single day. He even built his own bid calculator by binge-watching Ad Badger videos and reverse-engineering the math. (Yes, we're still a little emotional about this.)

Today? He doesn't touch it. The only reason he logs in is to pay invoices.

Gonza walks Mike through the whole ladder: hiring two guys with zero PPC experience, training them for a year, handing over campaigns one crumb at a time, then a year of watching without touching, until he admitted he was the slow part.

Plus: why he stopped launching for a full year, why 12 launches flopped and he's fine with it, why his best products were never going to work on Amazon (hint: the price tag), and how he learns a new channel by offering the best person alive money for an hour.

Also: why "hire an agency and go to the beach" is a lie, the question every brand should ask their agency, and what Yeti teaches us about knowing when to stop.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:53 — The bid calculator he built from old episodes
06:41 — "Why weren't results 10% better?"
09:05 — Elon, Twitter, and going past the mark
12:05 — The delegation formula says don't give up PPC
16:05 — Training Diego and Franco from total zero
17:21 — The slow handoff ladder (junk SKUs first)
18:47 — A full year of looking but not touching
19:46 — The day he stopped logging in
20:18 — Why agency-jumpers never learn anything
23:44 — The one question to ask your agency
26:01 — Big brands launch a lot and kill a lot
27:17 — The 80/20 flop rate is an Amazon thing
30:17 — The real reason the products failed: price
34:16 — "You're not Yeti in the car"
35:29 — Plan your launches around your MOQ
36:40 — Building your email list backwards from 1,500 units
38:39 — Learning Meta, Google, and email from scratch
39:13 — Pick a "true North"
40:30 — Offer the best person alive $2,500 for one hour
43:48 — "The more you read about parenting, the more you realize business was easy"

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin, Ad Badger's CEO
• Our guest: Gonza Martinez of Ziresquare
• Training PPC Managers Who Can Train Others
• How Can I Reach My Full Potential In The Amazon PPC Space?
• What's the Best Way to Manage an Amazon Brand?
• 📚 FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Review all our show notes

-

• Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
• Guest Co-Host: Gonza Martinez
• Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
• Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
• Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Five years ago you could hire a PPC manager for bids, budgets, keywords, campaign types and structure, and that was the whole job. Today Mike argues that a good Amazon PPC marketer is just a good Amazon marketer, and the job now reaches into what used to be somebody else's problem entirely: fees, refunds, logistics, and the one he thinks is most underrated, stock.

This is the case for letting your marketing team into your inventory data, and it starts with a client who flatly did not believe it mattered. Conversion rate is a product page problem and a PPC problem, they said. So Olena on the Ad Badger team built the chart that settled it - unit session percentage plotted against warehouse balance - and the split was uncomfortable. Above one threshold the numbers held. Below it they didn't. Sales, conversion rate, Buy Box. Not out of stock. Just low.

That sent Mike into inventory distortion - the combined financial drain of overstocking and stocking out, estimated to cost global retail 10 to 30% of total sales volume, and almost never mentioned alongside ACoS. He breaks the damage into four buckets: lost revenue that doesn't happen evenly (half a million Buy Box checks found roughly one in three products has at least one location with a suppressed Buy Box), rank decay, the PPC tax you pay while competitors take cheaper clicks, and capital locked up in overstock.

Then the SOP. Three reports - advertised products, FBA inventory health, and detailed page sales and traffic by ASIN - dropped into Claude with a prompt, and you have a dashboard. Mike walks an anonymized $400K a month account where roughly 30% of the catalog was fully out of stock and a couple of SKUs sat on over 1,000 days of supply. Plus the one nobody automates: nothing tells you when a product comes back in stock, which is exactly when you want the ads switched back on.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

• 00:00 - Intro
• 00:22 - What PPC management looked like five years ago
• 01:13 - Fees, refunds, logistics and stock: the new scope
• 01:44 - Lost revenue, rank decay, PPC tax and capital lockup
• 02:29 - The client who didn't believe it
• 03:07 - Unit session percentage vs warehouse balance
• 04:22 - Inventory distortion, and the 10 to 30%
• 05:36 - Problem 1: lost revenue, zip code by zip code
• 05:57 - What half a million Buy Box checks revealed
• 06:51 - Problems 2 and 3: rank decay and the PPC tax
• 07:28 - The SOP: three reports across two timeframes
• 09:03 - The case study: a $400K per month account
• 10:50 - Reading the dashboard: days of stock left
• 11:47 - The restocks nobody notifies you about
• 12:42 - A free zip code level Buy Box tool

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️
• Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO
• You're Not Out of Stock, So Why Are Your Sales Down?
• Buy Box Checker - free zip code level Buy Box and stock tracking
• 📚 Unlock our FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Review all our show notes

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Mike is flying solo, and for once the case file is his own: 400 episodes of The PPC Den, and what a decade of these conversations actually taught him about who wins on Amazon and who just stays busy.

There's a shirt involved. There's a DSLR. There's also the small matter of being #1 on both of FeedSpot's Amazon podcast lists - the 9 Best Amazon PPC Podcasts and the 14 Best Amazon Advertising Podcasts - which raises the question of how those are two different lists. Mike rewinds eight years to the first two videos ever published, back when the bidding advice was revenue-per-click and the first episode of this show asked whether we were living in the golden age of Amazon PPC.

Then the part worth writing down. Across 400 episodes and ten years of running Ad Badger, four things keep showing up in the people who succeed: they're never distracted by nonsense, they know how to prioritize, they never stop chasing product-market fit, and they treat the job as one that keeps evolving. On the way through you'll hear why there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets, why the most successful accounts Mike has worked on were the ones he barely had to touch, and the line most sellers have backwards - great PPC cannot save bad product-market fit, and PPC is the thing that tells you whether you have it.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

• 00:00 - Intro: 400 episodes of The PPC Den
• 00:32 - The DSLR, the shirt, and the milestone
• 01:32 - Two FeedSpot lists, two #1 rankings
• 01:54 - The first two YouTube videos, eight years ago
• 02:31 - The very first episode: the golden age of Amazon PPC
• 03:44 - Lesson 1: never distracted by nonsense
• 04:15 - No silver bullets, only lead bullets
• 05:48 - Lesson 2: the skill of prioritization
• 05:58 - Why the job got more complicated, not less
• 07:04 - Lesson 3: the product-market fit nobody finishes
• 07:20 - The easiest campaigns, and why they were easy
• 08:16 - What PPC tells you about product-market fit
• 08:40 - Lesson 4: the evolving role of the PPC manager
• 09:06 - The stock level and PPC performance mashup
• 09:51 - The commitments for the next 100 episodes
• 10:58 - The weekly digest plan
• 11:19 - Every company is a software company
• 12:52 - What 400 episodes changed

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin - Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
• How to Find Your Amazon Cross-Sales and True Organic Sales
• 📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist
• Review all our show notes

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

There is no shortage of AI hype for Amazon sellers. "AI bidding." "AI agents." Videos about tools that shipped this morning.

This is the opposite of that. Michael walks the full 10-level progression from clicking around in Seller Central to running autonomous, self-improving agents on your account and is honest about what each level actually costs you in time. Claws out.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

0:00 What's on Claws Out today
1:51 The problem with "AI bidding" content
2:11 AI is amazing and still a boatload of work
3:43 Bloom's Taxonomy: the framework to climb
5:06 ACT 1 Level 1: just the Amazon interface
6:04 What the interface is good and bad at
7:52 Don't automate anything until you have a mental model
8:45 Level 2: spreadsheets still a prerequisite?
9:38 Bulk files are the one file worth mastering
11:08 N-gram analysis on bulk files
11:50 ACT 2 Level 3: asking a raw LLM (the worst option)
12:16 The canoe problem: AI knows a lot, but it isn't wise
13:59 "My ACoS is high, what do I do?" where the nuance dies
14:58 Level 4: project-based LLMs and your knowledge base
16:14 Level 5: drop a spreadsheet into an LLM
17:56 Level 6: two data sources at once the magic starts
18:21 Maryna's stock-level dashboard
20:25 Level 7: coding agents (and why the line is blurring)
22:54 What a skill actually is
23:49 Level 8: read-only APIs and MCPs
24:52 Buy Box Checker MCP tools in action
26:59 No spreadsheets, no interface have AI build your own
28:19 Level 9: agentic workflows and the ad waste firewall
29:34 The catch: AI is not deterministic
30:32 Level 10: memory and the self-improvement cycle
31:38 Ad Badger now has its own MCP
32:20 Open-source skills and the Badger audit process
33:30 Your homework + see you in the Badger Den

🦡 Your Homework

1. Find your level on the ladder honestly. If you can't explain your budgeting protocol, keyword structure, and auto campaign strategy without opening a tool, you're at Level 1 stay there this week.
2. Get good at one bulk file. The legacy sponsored ads reports are being retired; bulk files are here to stay.
3. Connect the Ad Badger MCP wherever you already use AI and run a wasted spend audit.
4. Get on the Ad Badger email list weekly skill drops and walkthroughs are coming.

🦡 Resources & Links

🦡 Get Ad Badger
The N-Gram Analysis Tool
Amazon Ads Bulk Operations
Use AI & Spreadsheets to Prevent Stock-Outs📚 FREE Amazon Marketing Playbook
All show notes

-· Host: Michael Erickson Facchin

· Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

· Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash

· Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Mike is joined again by Steve Patenaude the closest thing this show has to a PPC detective to open a case that starts with a boring question and ends somewhere much more interesting: which of your products is actually earning the sale?

Amazon has retired the old sponsored product reports. The drag-and-drop builder that replaced them looks like extra homework, and it is but it also hands you two columns the old reports kept apart: the ASIN that was advertised, and the ASIN that was purchased. Put those side by side and the account stops looking like a list of products and starts looking like a set of relationships.

Steve found it while doing something ordinary. He was tightening up CM1, CM2 and CM3 to set targets product by product, and the numbers refused to sit still - cross-sales were everywhere, in an account with no parent-child variations at all. In the episode he and Mike build two reports out of that: one that shows what share of each ASIN's ad revenue was really a cross-sale (one product in the sample: 94%), and one that lands on a number almost nobody calculates correctly - true organic sales, business report revenue minus same-ASIN ad sales minus the sales that product picked up as somebody else's halo.

You'll also hear why total ACoS per product is usually wrong in both directions, what a 0% same-ASIN product is telling you, the loss-leader SKU trick that pulls shoppers onto a listing, and the stock-out that tanked a hero product's sales - except the hero product was never the one doing the work.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

• 00:00 – Intro with Steve Patenaude
• 02:50 – The end of the old sponsored product reports
• 03:43 – The new drag-and-drop report builder
• 04:29 – A client mystery: per-product profit targets
• 06:52 – One report for sponsored products, brands and display
• 07:22 – Advertised product ID vs converted product ID
• 07:59 – The most common total ACoS miscalculation
• 09:01 – The size of the halo without parent-child variations
• 09:31 – The non-hero ASIN driving the traffic
• 12:39 – A lookback window longer than 60 days
• 13:04 – Report 1: cross-sale share by advertised ASIN
• 14:42 – The reasons behind click A, buy B
• 15:48 – The cross-sale engineered on purpose
• 17:38 – The meaning of a 0% same-ASIN product
• 19:52 – The wrong way to read total ACoS per product
• 22:19 – Report 2: the true organic sales formula
• 23:16 – The share of product B's sales that PPC earned
• 27:04 – A rank drop misdiagnosed after a stock-out
• 28:26 – 100% organic vs 10% organic: the levers
• 30:09 – Three dashboards from the new reporting tool

🦡 Resources & Links

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin — Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
• Our guest today is Steve Patenaude
• PPC Detectives: Solving Amazon's Most Mysterious Performance Crimes
• When Higher Total ACOS Means More Profit
• How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Account Using Bulk Files and Business Reports
• 📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist
• Review all our show notes

-

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Steve Patenaude
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Mike is joined again by Steve Patenaude, the closest thing this show has to a PPC detective, to open a case that starts with a boring question and ends somewhere much more interesting: which of your products is actually earning the sale?

Amazon has retired the old sponsored product reports. The drag-and-drop builder that replaced them looks like extra homework, and it is — but it also hands you two columns the old reports kept apart: the ASIN that was advertised, and the ASIN that was purchased. Put those side by side and the account stops being a list of products and becomes a set of relationships.

Steve found it while doing something ordinary — tightening up CM1, CM2 and CM3 to set targets product by product. The numbers refused to sit still: cross-sales were everywhere, in an account with no parent-child variations at all. He and Mike build two reports out of that: one showing what share of each ASIN's ad revenue was really a cross-sale (one product in the sample: 94%), and one that lands on a number almost nobody calculates correctly — true organic sales, business report revenue minus same-ASIN ad sales minus the sales that product picked up as somebody else's halo.

You'll also hear why total ACoS per product is usually wrong in both directions, what a 0% same-ASIN product is telling you, the loss-leader SKU trick that pulls shoppers onto a listing, and the stock-out that tanked a hero product's sales — except the hero product was never the one doing the work.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

00:00 – Intro with Steve Patenaude
02:50 – The end of the old sponsored product reports
03:43 – The new drag-and-drop report builder
04:29 – A client mystery: per-product profit targets
06:52 – One report for sponsored products, brands and display
07:22 – Advertised product ID vs converted product ID
07:59 – The most common total ACoS miscalculation
09:01 – The size of the halo without parent-child variations
09:31 – The non-hero ASIN driving the traffic
12:39 – A lookback window longer than 60 days
13:04 – Report 1: cross-sale share by advertised ASIN
14:42 – The reasons behind click A, buy B
15:48 – The cross-sale engineered on purpose
17:38 – The meaning of a 0% same-ASIN product
19:52 – The wrong way to read total ACoS per product
22:19 – Report 2: the true organic sales formula
23:16 – The share of product B's sales that PPC earned
27:04 – A rank drop misdiagnosed after a stock-out
28:26 – 100% organic vs 10% organic: the levers
30:09 – Three dashboards from the new reporting tool

🦡 Resources & Links

• Get Ad Badger
• Michael Erickson Facchin — Ad Badger's CEO and PPC whisperer
• PPC Detectives: Solving Amazon's Most Mysterious Performance Crimes
• When Higher Total ACOS Means More Profit
• How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Account Using Bulk Files
• 📚 Amazon Marketing Playbook & Advertising checklist
• Our newsletter
• All our show notes

· Host & Exec Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin

· Guest Co-Host: Steve Patenaude

· Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

· Coordinator & Design: Sofiia Podash

· Editor: Pedro Moreno

Amazon started pulling your ad spend straight out of your seller balance on August 1, 2026 no credit card float, no points, no 25-60 day settlement window. In this Claws Out mini-episode Michael breaks down what changed, the new AI image labeling rules you need to follow before your next upload, and why a 3.4 star rating is a bigger threat to your business than any bid you could adjust.

Three things, eight minutes, claws out.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 Highlights

0:00 - What's on Claws Out today

0:15 - Amazon now pulls ad spend from your seller balance

0:50 - What you actually lose: credit card points and float

1:35 - "Based on feedback" - how this change got here

2:00 - New AI transparency rules in advertising

2:24 - Amazon's rule: photorealistic AI-generated people

3:02 - Demo: tagging an AI image in 30 seconds

3:41 - Why you should double-check the tag didn't get stripped

4:15 - A real listing that got suspended over this

4:39 - A 3.4 star rating is not a PPC problem

5:25 - The ACoS math: conversion rate does the heavy lifting

6:20 - 4 fixes: images, rating, bullets, price

7:08 - Your homework + never stop searching

🦡 Your Homework

1. Open your payment profile and check how your ad spend is being funded.

2. Any listing image with a photorealistic AI-generated person needs the keyword "contains-synthetic-performer" in the dc:subject (XMP) field before you upload it. Real people, non-photorealistic art, and images with no people are exempt.

3. If your rating is under 4.5, fix that before you touch your bids.

🦡 Resources & Links

🦡 GET AD BADGER ➡️ https://www.adbadger.com/pricing-product-tour/

- Amazon Is Now Deducting Ad Spend From Your Account Balance

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ads-payment-change-account-balance-deduction/

- Break-Even ACoS: The Number That Tells You What You Can Afford

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/break-even-amazon-acos/

- ACoS on Amazon: The Complete Guide

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-education/acos-amazon/

- ACoS Is Lying To You

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/acos-is-lying-to-you-why-the-most-watched-metric-in-amazon-ppc-is-also-the-most-misleading/

- TACoS vs ACoS: Definition, Formula & Calculator

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-tacos-definition-formula-calculator-tacos-vs-acos/

- Amazon PPC Audit Checklist: 9 Checks + Free Template

https://www.adbadger.com/blog/amazon-ppc-audit-checklist-9-checks-free-template/

- Amazon requires sellers to label AI-generated people (Forbes)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielalinzainescu/2026/07/25/amazon-requires-sellers-to-label-ai-generated-people-in-listing-images/

📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook: https://www.adbadger.com/amazon-ppc-checklist/

- Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.adbadger.com/newsletter/

-

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin

Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash

Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Mike is joined by Dan Head of AMZ Elite, a full-service Amazon consultancy with 20 years of experience, to talk about the thing every AI-curious seller keeps circling: how to stop asking generic AI generic questions.

The premise is simple. AI knows a lot about things you don't, but the best operators in any field will laugh at its default advice. The fix is a "second brain" a private, company-specific store of your SOPs, your data, and your hard-won corrections that AI can actually read and act on.

Dan walks through what he's built: a news digest that reads his inboxes and YouTube transcripts and boils the week down to two or three pages, an Obsidian vault of markdown SOPs, and a Command Center wired to Amazon that produces a daily triage report the one that caught a campaign spending 4x overnight and flagged the portfolios to drop to a $1 budget after a stock-out. Mike covers how Ad Badger vectorizes its own Google Docs so any team member can query an SOP in plain English from Claude, Google Chat, or ClickUp.

You'll also hear the single most useful prompt Dan has ever learned, why summaries alone will cost you the details that matter, and the trap to avoid: don't use AI to invent new work, use it to put work someone is already doing into warp speed.

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 HIGHLIGHTS

• 00:00 – Intro with Dan Head of AMZ Elite
• 04:21 – What a "second brain" is, and why default AI advice falls flat
• 08:17 – Dan's news digest: inboxes, YouTube transcripts, Obsidian clips
• 11:32 – The SOP problem in a remote team
• 13:03 – Inside the Command Center and the daily triage report
• 14:52 – What triage caught today: a stock-out and a 4x spend spike
• 15:47 – The simple version: three CSV exports and one SOP
• 17:29 – Saving time, not cutting staff
• 19:32 – Getting a team to actually adopt it
• 21:37 – Obsidian, and a new listing built in 60 minutes
• 25:18 – Giving your AI the keys to do the task
• 27:21 – Keeping SOPs fresh: the 75/125 title change
• 32:53 – Dan's best prompt: drop the bias
• 35:00 – Make your second brain log its own mistakes
• 37:59 – The trap: don't let AI invent work

🦡 RESOURCES & LINKS

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER
• Your host: Michael Erickson Facchin, Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
• Our guest: Dan Head of AMZ Elite
• Dan's first appearance: Three Important Weekly Tasks for Amazon PPC
• Actually Useful Use Cases of AI in Amazon Marketing
• How to Combine Organic, PPC & Ranking Data with AI to Optimize Every Amazon Keyword
• How to Use AI & Spreadsheets to Prevent Amazon Stock-Outs
• How to Audit Your Amazon PPC Account Using Bulk Files and Business Reports
• How to Avoid Micromanaging Your Amazon PPC Team
• 📚 Free Amazon Marketing Playbook & Advertising checklist
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Review all our show notes

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin

Guest Co-Host: Dan Head

Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash

Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno

Today Michael welcomes back Priscilla Wagner of Relentless B2C, Marine Corps veteran, and quite possibly the most spreadsheet-brained guest in Badger Nation. She's been on the show for the visibility death spiral, for classifying keywords by how they actually behave instead of by raw console numbers, and for the custom Excel bidding system Michael still talks about. This time she's opening up her forecasting model.

The idea: auditing an account that's already running is the easy version. The data is sitting right there. Forecasting is the hard version, because you're projecting spend and revenue off keywords that have zero performance history attached to them. As Michael puts it, the digital marketer in all of us wants to launch big and find out fast but sitting down to plot it out first is what real businesses do.

Priscilla walks through the entire build. Tiering roughly 90 competitors by relevancy using Helium 10 and Claude. Bucketing keywords into core, expansion, branded, and broad discovery. Pulling current impression share straight out of the Search Query Performance report, then picking a lift target that's "big enough to read, small enough to test." She also shares the variable Michael had never seen anyone put in a forecast before: click-through rate and conversion rate decay, because your CTR cannot possibly hold steady as your impression bucket multiplies.

And there's a real case study in here. One client's forecast surfaced a buy box problem before a single ad went live so the recommendation wasn't a campaign structure, it was "stop selling to resellers first."

We'll see you in The PPC Den!

🦡 HIGHLIGHTS

00:00 – Welcome back, Priscilla Wagner
02:54 – Why forecasting is harder than auditing
06:19 – "Are ads just stealing our organic sales?"
08:45 – Step one: 90 competitors in Helium 10
11:06 – Tiering competitors 1 through 4
16:30 – Picking a realistic target: 1.5% to 8%
18:40 – The four keyword buckets
19:50 – Reading impression share in Search Query Performance
22:00 – Where CTR and CVR come from with no history
25:10 – CTR and CVR decay as impressions grow
30:30 – Turning keywords into a starting budget
31:20 – Case study: fix the buy box before you spend
35:00 – What 3% looks like when 8% is too aggressive
39:00 – Everyone has a plan until they get punched
42:00 – How often to rerun the forecast

🦡 RESOURCES & LINKS

• 🦡 GET AD BADGER
• Find Michael Erickson Facchin — Ad Badger's CEO and soul, PPC whisperer, and your go-to guide through the wild world of Amazon advertising
• Find Priscilla Wagner at Relentless B2C — MBA, Marine Corps veteran, and full-service Amazon PPC + SEO strategist (LinkedIn)
• Advanced Amazon PPC Bid Optimization
• 📚 Unlock our FREE comprehensive Amazon Marketing Playbook
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Transform your workflow with our comprehensive Amazon Advertising checklist
• Review all our show notes

🦡 CREDITS

Host and Executive Producer: Michael Erickson Facchin
Guest Co-Host: Priscilla Wagner
Senior Producer: Nancy Lili Gonzalez
Podcast Coordinator & Graphic Designer: Sofiia Podash
Video and Audio Editor: Pedro Moreno